Seeking the Source of Discontent

In the months surrounding the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage across the country, right-wing Christians have become increasingly willing to cast blame — seemingly hypocritically — on a group they have often dismissed or outright ignored: Progressive Christians, especially those who support marriage equality.

The first hints of a growing front against liberal Christians came in May, when a coalition of conservative churches in Fountain Hills, Arizona publicly ganged up on a local progressive Methodist community. Unhappy with the church’s teachings, eight congregations launched a campaign entitled “Progressive Christianity: Fact or Fiction?,” a coordinated teaching and preaching series that included op-eds, a half-page advertisement in a local newspaper, and a massive banner with “progressive” written in jagged red letters and hemmed in quotation marks.

I thought that this anti-progressive sentiment was not evident in my denomination of the United Methodist Church, as we’ve lived together in diversity for almost 50 years.

But this past month, I realized how bad it might actually be.

Bartering for Progressive Expulsion

I recently heard a story that really disturbed me…and I’m pretty savvy about the dark side of Methodist church politics.

The story goes that in the South Central Jurisdiction (annual conference withheld for privacy reasons), a conservative member met with a progressive member of their annual conference, saying that conservative traditionalists were willing to compromise on removing the incompatibility clause (the line that says homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching). That’s great…but in exchange, they wanted mutual support of another action: the elimination of the progressive Western Jurisdiction.

This is a perfect example of the above article: when the waters have shifted in favor of one progressive goal, some folks want to just plug the well of progressive waters under the guise of protecting the “covenant” (whatever that is).

Who leaves or who is cast out?

Over the past 10 years, for folks seeking to divide the UMC, the rhetoric of “who leaves” has shifted from “the Conservatives want to leave” to “let’s make the Progressives leave.”

From the 1980s to as late as 2006, the rhetoric of conservative traditionalists in the United Methodist Church was to “let us leave with the property.”

I was present at the 2004 General Conference when amicable separation was first mentioned at the national meeting, asking for the conservative churches to part ways with the wayward denomination.

The entire last chapter of Dr. Thomas Oden’s 2006 book Turning Around the Mainline is a proposal (though a faulty one) on how conservative churches can beat the trust clause. Dr. Oden is currently a board member at the Confessing Movement, was active in Good News and chaired the IRD board for a time.

But since 2006, the rhetoric has shifted to “let’s let the progressives leave.”

This is the premise of the A&W schism plan promoted by Dean David Watson of United Theological Seminary and Professor Bill Arnold at Asbury Theological Seminary–neither of which are significantly populated by progressives in their faculty or student body. You can read Hacking Christianity’s coverage of this plan here.

Furthermore, it was the professed stance of the Good News movement when Rev. Hutchison was removed from a United Methodist pastorate and his former congregation began considering leaving the UMC. Here’s the quote:

Good News said in a statement that the congregation should be permitted to leave the denomination with its property and assets. “We believe the exercise of the trust clause to hold congregations within the church is a poor foundation upon which to build church unity,” the group said.

As you see, paralleling the shift in popular opinion on marriage equality is the shift in rhetoric from conservative abandonment to progressive expulsion, exacerbated by online trolls who talk up maximum punishment for every “covenant” violation.

Turnabout is Fair Play?

The conservatives that I’ve seen engage this article have pointed out that they have been oppressed by mainline liberalism for decades and that it‘s time for the progressives to feel how it felt.

But that’s not how the story was in the United Methodist Church. Instead, conservatives created their own parallel denomination alongside the UMC which was tolerated, not excommunicated.

As researched earlier this year, conservative traditionalists began creating their parallel reality within the UMC a long time ago. Through the Mission Society (1984 parallel to the General Board of Global Missions), Bristol House Books (1987 parallel to Abingdon), and the RENEW network (1989 parallel to UM Women), they created their own parallel structure that provides books, women’s fellowship, and missionaries for congregations to support outside of United Methodist oversight, accountability, or connectional leadership.

However, they did this by remaining Methodist and remaining in the Church–and these parallel structures were not destroyed by the mainline, and in fact continue today (except Bristol Books which closed this year) and the GBGM is even doing joint efforts with the Mission Society.

There’s little parallel between the perceived treatment of evangelicals and the treatment today of progressives. When the conservative activists created a parallel reality within United Methodism, they were not kicked out of the church. And yet today when progressive annual conferences and even jurisdictions act within Methodist polity (not paralleling it!) in a different way, the expressed desire is to kick them out and cast them off.

That’s not turnabout–that’s just mean.

The Progressive Moment?

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.”

Gandhi (attributed)

Progressives are in Stage Three of Gandhi’s (attributed) theorem above, having been ignored for a long while, and then ridiculed by the smarmy IRD for decades. While the Southern Baptists got to this same stage and successfully excommunicated the moderates and progressives, the United Methodists likely won’t get to that stage due to our more complex connectional structure…but efforts like this make me wonder.

They make me wonder if the reigning conservative activists remember that we really are best when we work together. I’ve served in annual conferences where my perspective is in the majority and where my perspective is deeply in the minority. In both places I see the strength of our connection as well as the energy that comes from the margins and the creative minorities in those places. We should be encouraging creative minorities, not allowing the majority to silence or kick them out.

It takes a left wing and a right wing to fly, but it takes them working together to soar. My hope is that the conservatives follow the Wesleyan tradition of both wings rather than the monoculture approach of the Southern Baptists–to the benefit of all of Christianity. I yearn for a United Methodist Church that has the evangelical zeal combined with a relevant social witness that is a headlight to culture, not a tail-light behind it. I yearn for a church with the same freedom of thought as freedom of innovative action–truly, one that is better together.

Let’s continue to yearn together until the Spirit brings something new. It may be scary to the power-brokers on both sides of the aisle–but it may be a new way forward together.

Comments

I became a Methodist two years ago to support the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN) effort to reform the backward thinking and hateful policy of the denomination’s exclusion and condemnation of LGBT Christians. I don’t have to be a Methodist to be a progressive Christian or to live and draw strength from my faith. It would be easier to belong to a church with an official policy that wholly embraces the equality of every person’s human dignity and value to God. I admire the many devoted progressives in the UMC’s RMN who sacrifice dearly to refocus Methodist theology on what Jesus would do… to reach out, understand, empathize with other’s suffering and needs and to embrace them, lift them up and love others regardless of their differences, even because of them. I just don’t know how long I care to make the UMC’s unique denominational fight my fight. I feel frequent anger and dismay caused by dull-minded hate-filled conservative anti-LGBT Methodists threatening and harming my progressive Methodist friends. OI want to applaud and support my progressive UMC friends, but it is a psychological burden I can easily shed, along with my donations to the UMC, UMCOR and RMN. Should I care if the Methodist denomination devolves into a weird mix of white, privileged, conservative, almost KKK-minded Americans allied with overseas African and Korean Methodists to condemn and crush LGBT Christians? So what if they do expel progressives from the UMC denomination? What will remain will be a church less and less connected to the evolution of American life or to the life of Jesus. I’d not be surprised if future reports have Ugandan or Kenyan UMC congregations hunting down LGBT neighbors to throw them off of church steeples like ISIS is doing under Sharia Law. That would make the once truly Christian Methodist denomination a farce of the original faith and a tool of Satan. Uhm…maybe I should stick it out to offer progressive UMC brethren the moral and financial support I can offer to them. It’s just so draining to my psyche to hear the endless UMC horror stories caused by conservative ghouls.

“dull-minded hate-filled conservative anti-LGBT Methodists”. Talk like that kind of makes conversation between the two factions rather pointless. Looks like we are in a winner take all struggle for The UMC.

If you want to talk about wesleyanism, it’s worth noting that Wesley didn’t value the extremes of religion within the Methodist movement. He regularly expelled lots of folks from the movement who were not interested in spreading scriptural holiness. We can have a talk about what spreads scriptural holiness, but to act as though removal from the body is somehow not Wesleyan is false.

Breaking fellowship was definitely a last resort for Wesley. His interactions with the Fetter Lane Society demonstrated that. Wesley went out of his way to maintain unity with rogue groups, and he argued against separated from the Church of England. Wesley was much more reluctant to break fellowship than your comment makes out.

As I indicated, I’m withholding the name due to privacy concerns. I’m honoring that request in order to write about it. You have to decide whether to believe it or not, based on your assessment of my truthfulness in other writings.

Jeremy–While I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful consideration in the matter, I have no idea what “privacy issues” there might be in identifying myself as the author of several resolutions that will come from the Texas Annual Conference to the General Conference next spring. What I can tell you, however, is that the story you heard is not exactly correct.

I wrote the resolution to remove the incompatibility language because I believe it has not been helpful and that it is unduly abrasive. When some of my progressive colleagues joined me in sponsoring the proposal at the Texas Conference, I was grateful for their support and when it passed our conference with both progressive and orthodox support, I saw it as a hopeful sign that perhaps we can find a compromise that works for our greater connection as well.

There was absolutely no discussion at all, however, of coupling that with support for the jurisdictional reduction proposal which–despite what some might suggest–is not about muzzling progressive voices in the West or eliminating the Western Jurisdiction per se but simply about finding a way to more equitably and fiscally increase our witness in all parts of the country. (My comment on your earlier post, referenced in the article above at the end, explains that for any who would like to hear the rationale.) To my knowledge, most of my progressive friends will not support that proposal, nor did I ever ask or expect them to do so.

Sorry to disappoint any who are looking for a nefarious angle here, but the truth is there is no quid pro quo on this one and there never was. If we all back away from the conspiratorial corners we’ve wedged ourselves into, in fact, perhaps we can actually take all of the resolutions at face value without assigning malevolent motives.

Should anyone wish to discuss this more directly, I am happy to do so via my email at chappell@cumcsl.org. Thanks for your continuing contributions to the conversations of the church we need to be having. C. Chappell Temple, Sugar Land, Texas.

Hello Rev. Temple, thanks for your comment. If you are the referred party, it’s clear that you remember the conversation very differently than it was recounted to me. It might be helpful for you two (or three or however many) to compare recollections.

Regardless of your particular situation, the rhetoric of expulsion has crested since the Biblical Obedience movement and I don’t think one needs to spend much time in social media or water cooler conversations to see the same efforts.

From your perspective, why do you think before 5-8 years ago the rhetoric was for conservatives to be able to leave, and now it’s more about having the progressives leave?

What I see out there, and what would be a good idea, is that anyone can leave, progressive or conservative or anyplace in between, for any reason. Have a discernment process requiring, say 2/3 approval by the congregation in 2 separate votes at least 6 months apart. Why spend money on lawsuits? Better to use it to fulfill the great commission.

Perhaps if Jeremy wants to be taken at his word, then he should extend the same courtesy to Rev. Temple.

To what should be no one’s surprise, the truth isn’t quite as Jeremy presented it because of his tendency to hear what he wants to hear, his disinterest in seeking more information and his weakness for conspiracy theories.

One reason for the “change” (which isn’t a change) is that revisionists (for instance your ally Rev. DeLong) talk about exit when she isn’t talking about disruption if she doesn’t get what she wants and it is virtually certain that a denomination-wide change in our ordination standards isn’t going to happen.

I was attacked and bullied by the leadership of the North Alabama Conference. Other progressive clergy from the North Alabama Conference have been treated in similar fashion. Progressive congregations have been treated in similar fashion. I was asked if my wife, who is employed by a major national company could move out of state. When I replied that this was possible, I was told that the leadership of the conference would gladly help me move to another annual conference. I have filed complaints against the people who attacked and bullied me. These complaints have been dismissed. The congregation that I served, which was attacked, expelling the leaders and members, filed complaints, all the way up the so-called chain of appeals. All of these were dismissed. I have begun to question if the so-called due-process of the UMC really exists.

Responding to some of the reactions to my comment… I wrote my comment as a Christian, not as a liberal or progressive or social advocate. I try to live my faith with the holiness that Jesus Christ demonstrated and spoke. I respect that conservatives believe that they do the same, but I deem them to be mean and misguided in theology and spirit when they exclude LGBT Christians. Whether I stay in or I leave the Methodist denomination for reasons stated won’t make me more or less of a Christian. As regards what’s admirable in Wesleyanism, patience, meekness and tireless efforts to reach understanding and compromise, Jesus had his moments of exasperation. What did Christ say to his host at the Great Banquet after the mysterious woman came and left? There are times to be patient, to calmly repeat the message and pray for needed change. There are also times to demand change. Civil rights were not created for African Americans in the 60s only by patient talk, discussion and revelation that social justice was the Way of Jesus Christ.

The Methodist denomination is at a tipping point where it cab become increasingly relevant to Christian life in a modern global context, or it take a partisan detour leading members to empower their pride by promoting fear, exclusion and condemnation. Living Christian faith is not about fanning egos through power and control, but about authenticity in the Way of Jesus… meekness, serving others, performing the difficult tasks of understanding and living as Jesus taught and demonstrated.

If Methodists seeking to oust progressive Christians from the denomination are successful, those leaving the UMC denomination will likely take with them their support for UMCOR and other humanitarian missions that the UMC denomination does so well. A conservative stranglehold on Methodist leadership will politicize the church, making it an arm of conservative Republicans. In the long run, that is a losing proposition given American demographics and the increasingly progressive attitudes of younger generations.

A conservative stranglehold on UMC leadership will also likely change the focus and functions of UMCOR to reflect conservative condemnation of LGBT people in 3rd world countries. If that becomes apparent, then expect UMCOR to increasingly lose financial support from younger Methodists rejecting such a conservative posture. I admire UMCOR as it is today and don’t want to see its posture and potential to help needy people diminish due to a doctrinal schism in the UMC denomination.

Thanks “Snarky” (Kevin). I actually supported right leaning conservative Republican politics for decades until reading in 2011 a monumental treatise on Christianity called “The Christian Legacy: Taming Brutish Human Nature In Western Civilization” (Life Wisdom Books, 2011, Edgar L. Eckfeldt, Ph.D.) That revealed to me what is pristine Christianity vs. a faith corrupted by those in or seeking power. I am not a Democratic liberal partisan. I am a Christian questioning how to live my life in relation to the examples and teachings of Jesus Christ. My passion comes from my faith, not politics. If you want to explore progressive Christian faith rather than mock it, peruse my Face Book group “Progressive Christian Faith: How Should It Translate To Our Life?” at https://www.facebook.com/groups/448500858501773/

I fear that if the trust clause is suspended, while 10% on the far right OR the far left may leave, so many churches are in the middle. Whatever “side” leaves, The UMC, without checks and balances will remove any nuance on our social stances and become ultra-left or ultra-right “Ecangelical-Fundamentalist”– by default, all the remaining local churches, many of whom are far less polarized, but exist in the messy middle, will be known only by the edge that stayed and will increasingly be pushed in that direction (again, be it far left, or far right– away from any via media). Indivudual congregations, seminaries, and schools will face terrible choices and internal animosity: we must stay together, the failure to do so will be far worse than the A & W Plan or similar ones ever intended.

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[…] a larger frame. The previous week some awful legislation advanced that would have accelerated the expulsion of Progressives from The UMC. They were waiting in the wings to be voted on and made into law, and they might […]

[…] schism or exclusion of progressives and those seeking LGBTQ inclusion failed in their attempts to cut off the West at General Conference, recent attempts are perhaps at the midnight hour of making this actually […]